What does your own research on global governance currently focus on?
I am trying to understand how the global governance system has produced somewhat endogenously the kind of resistance that we have been observing for a number of years now. This is clearly reflected in the current populist backlash but there are other signs of contention as well, including resistance by rising powers or transnational protests. Essentially, my argument is that this kind of resistance is very much a product of the way global governance institutions and arrangements have developed and a reflection of their deficiencies. I am currently writing a rather theoretical book on this topic and a number of projects at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) are also looking at these issues. For example, we have a project on the demands, preferences and ideas of non-Western powers and how much they contradict Western notions of global governance. Another WZB project, which we have called “Political Sociology of Cosmopolitanism and Communitarianism”, looks at the new cleavage within Western societies generated by globalisation. We try to understand what this cleavage really is about, whether it reappears on the international and transnational level, and what its social-structural foundations are.
What are the most interesting debates in global governance at the moment?
From my point of view, the decisive conceptual issue is whether global governance should still be treated as a sub-field of or an approach to International Relations (IR) or as something fundamentally different. While there has been a clear shift within IR away from the study of “peace and war” to the study of international cooperation and international institutions, this shift has still taken place under the notion that we live in an anarchical international system. The question essentially was and to a large extent still remains: What are the conditions for cooperation under anarchy? The difference if you take a global governance approach is to acknowledge that there is not only an anarchical international system but also a global political system, consisting of many different arrangements, some of which contain hierarchy and pockets of authority and in that sense the system also contains stratification. The classical anarchical system approach maintained that we can study the international system without knowing anything about social theory because it is a different system, one that is essentially free of normativity. In contrast, global governance brings social theory back into the study of international affairs and I think this is a really interesting development.
What are some of the issue areas that we need to look at more?
We certainly know more about international governance and authority structures than about transnational or multi-stakeholder structures and actors. This is because we haven’t yet moved far beyond case-studies of international arrangements. We know that transnational arrangements are also important and that they can sometimes be even more effective than international ones, but at the same time they are not being studied in a systematic manner.
In terms of issue areas, the ones that are currently under-regulated on the global level tend to be the ones that are also understudied. That is unfortunate because we should try to understand why in certain heavily globalised issues areas, such as global finance, global taxing, or migration, there is so little global governance. So there is a tendency of global governance research to focus on those issue areas where we do have relatively strong global governance in place but we also need to look more into issue areas where these mechanisms are weak or inexistent.
This interview was conducted by Julia Kreienkamp (GGI Research Assistant) at the inaugural Global Governance International Network Meeting hosted by the Global Governance Institute in November 2016.
Michael Zürn is Director of the research unit on Global Governance at WZB (Social Science Research Center Berlin) and Professor of International Relations at the Free University Berlin (FU Berlin). He was founding Dean of the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin (2004-2009). He is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science and the Academy of Europe. He is author of numerous monographs and anthologies, and has published various articles in International Organization, World Politics, International Studies Quarterly, Global Policy,International Theory, Journal of Common Market Studies, West European Politics, Politics,Politische Vierteljahresschrift, Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen, and Leviathan, among others.
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